On the Ease of Friendships..

When we’re told to “put in work”, does this mean we’re forcing our relationships?

If you’re new here, these musings are meant to be reflections that are unfiltered, non-refined, and as much as possible, non-reviewed. The goal is to write authentically, achieve a state of flow with ideas, and not to think too much about ‘audience’, but about ‘ideas’ both in intellectual, and grammatical mistakes senses. :) Welcome!

Hello friend. It’s been a while.

I’m baffled by friends who put the times where they meet friends in their calendars. I always tell people I’m hanging out with: “I refuse to turn you into an appointment in my calendar. I respect you and your time more than this”.. I feel it as a matter of principle, where reducing my friendships to time blocks turn them into a ‘chore’ or a ‘task’ rather than something I genuinely look forward to. I do believe if something is that valuable and important to me, I will remember it in my own way… This binary position I take might seem a bit strict, but it comes from the obligation I have towards people who dedicate time to see me or hang out with me, to treat them with the same level of dedication to their own times.. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I still refuse to make my friendships calendar inputs.

In the places I lived, I had to create relationships from scratch every 5 or so years for the past 10 years. So currently, I’m in my 3rd city, and my 3rd attempt to create a community of friends. I mentioned this briefly in one of my recent notes, about how we’re told maintaining friendships requires work, effort, dedication, etc etc. The sentiment is echoed in

David Spinks

newsletter about communities and how they emerge, making it sound like having friends & community a complicated/difficult task, but I genuinely beg to differ, mainly due to my experience in achieving friendship does not require that much ‘intentional’ effort from each one of us. I also don’t have the prowess & skill to structure an essay like he does, which is why I’m subscribed to his Substack: to learn. And this might be a tangent to his post, but both of us touch on similar topics.

I do believe there is a minimum requirement of “alignment” with whoever we become friends with. This alignment can be in the form of shared activities & hobbies, shared beliefs, shared spaces, or even shared relationships. Yet, the existence of these things does not mean the existence of friendships.

But, let me get to my main point..

A late summer sun somewhere on a walk home. It’s enjoyable when the light and colors cooperate.

How Friendships Flourish. I think!

I think for friendships to flourish we need three things: good intentions, forgiveness, and openness.. While these might be very instinctual, the practice of these qualities is not really that easy. I’m not saying they’re hard either..

Why should we approach friends and friendships with good intentions?

Simply because over analyzing your friendships, your friends, and their behavior will leave you without friends.. Also, if anything happens to our friends which prevents them and us from being in contact, we generally tend to find who is at fault for our ‘plans’ to fall through. That accountability mindset generally is a reason why friendships fall. If we take the root of the word itself, we find it to be putting a numerical value to our friendships, and assigning numbers to humans seems - to me at least- to be at odds with being human. I don’t say that we shouldn’t be truthful with our friends, what I’m saying is that we become generous in not-counting what our friendships are.. The release from having to tabulate our relationships frees us from the burden of keeping up with the humanity of humans, and the fragility of being a human in a world that is increasingly forcing us to assign material values to our whole existence..

But that doesn’t happen in a vacuum.. The famous poet Bashar Ibn Burd is famously quoted for these lines:

If you reproach your friend for everything, You will find none whom you do not reproach.

Thus, live in solitude or bond with your brother, For he will sometimes err and sometimes avoid it.

If you refuse to drink the bitter with the sweet, You will remain parched, for who among us has unblemished draughts?.. ¹

But all this is practice, it might not be an effort, but it’s a mindset..

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Forgive your friends..

And this comes from the poetry of the unblemished draughts. If we don’t approach our friendships from a principle of forgiveness, we will be without friends sooner than we think.. We tend to turn into absolutists when people wrong us, or violate our friendships, and this has its merits.. Yet, our lives can improve drastically, if we (myself included) approach who we deal with in life with a lower expectation. We can adopt something that sounds like “maybe they had a reason I don’t know about it yet” instead of accusatory “why did they do this?”

We will never understand us, as much as we tried. So, letting go of the attempt of understanding every motive allows our friends to reciprocate this behavior towards us when we err, and there’s no doubt that we have against our friends. The old proverb says:

“Whoever does not overlook (or ignore) others’ faults, will live a troubled life"

And this applies to everything in life, including our friends. Especially our friends.

Opening up to and for our friends

And I want to differentiate between the two, because there’s a sense of “being available” that honors our friends, not just by opening up to them, but by allowing ourselves to focus on them whenever we feel the need that they need us, or when we feel that they might need us. This is another dimension of friendships, one where we allow ourselves to anticipate our friends’ needs beyond our conversations with them, or what they tell us. Yes, this comes with time and understanding of our friends; how they communicate to us, how we approach them, and how we (and they) respond to extended hands. Yet, once we start extending our hand to our friends without them asking, we allow ourselves the reciprocity of openness, which I believe is the mark of a genuine friendship & community. In Arabic we say: “Giving out of one’s self” to describe this behavior & mindset, because our friends are parts of us and who we are. Hence, there’s a level of commitment to our friends that is inherent in the language we use to identify them.

I’ve grown up with friends I’ve been fortunate and blessed to know for over 20 or 25 years who I am still close with to this day and talk to almost daily. A core group of ‘companions’ who become confidants, support network, personal advisors, and sometimes bullies. I recognize that this is not common in the modern life, but in societies where community precedes the individual, this is still not a rare thing to see. In Pakistan for example, they recognize the elders by calling them “Sahib”, which derives its Arabic word of ‘friend’ or ‘companion’, because the level of companionship is a level of respect.

Living in New York, people are told to avoid everyone they meet, but they also worry about being lonely. We have gone past the point of recognition that the modern life doesn’t do us good, yet we willfully still participate in the behavior that adds to our misery of ‘avoiding people’ and ‘not talking to strangers’. In this modern life, I try to combat that isolation in my own ways, I will call friends, send them voice notes, and meet without a prior notice, because this is what ‘friends’ are. They’re not ‘calendar appointments’. I insist on greeting everyone, mainly because it’s something I’ve grown up with, but it also comes from the faithful practice of spreading ‘greetings’ which we are taught to do from young age. In the Muslim tradition, Prophet Muhammad shared a pearl of wisdom when he said:

“You will not be granted Paradise until you believe, and you will not (truly) believe until you love one another. Shall I not tell you of something which, if you do it, you will love one another? Spread the greetings of peace amongst yourselves.”

And that spreading of greetings is a manifestation of community and an extension of the self towards others, because we generally do not request anything with that, but we start with ourselves to acknowledge others we cross paths with regularly, and recognize their humanity, because part of faith is the universality of loving the best towards others, and loving others.²

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Friendship is not a ‘chore’.

Sometimes, we feel the need to put in ‘work’ in our relationships with our friends, and that in my mind negates the basic tenant of friendships, which is that we need our friends. When we do not carve from ourselves to our friends, we turn them into an ‘obligation’, or a ‘social responsibility’ in order not to feel lonely, or not to sit on our couches on the weekends. I believe that friends are people we need in our lives because they represent something they love, be it a character trait, or a virtue, or a personal quality, or an intellectual enrichment. I get irked whenever I have to plan diligently to meet my friends, and I was discussing this with a couple of people, that the fact that I have to inform you I’m ‘available’ to meet you ‘next week on Thursday’ means I prioritize many things above meeting you. I tend to reject these friend invitations. They lack an essential quality of spontaneity and self-drive, instead, they’re driven by our calendars. And my friendships are not dentist appointments.

Friendships end. This is also fine.

Part of the alignment and the personal growth is that sometimes we find ourselves at odds with our friends, and that is something that we usually stress about a bit more than we should. Or more than we would like.

There are some studies that friendships last around 7 years, before changing drastically, or ending. While this can be true, this sometimes can mean that friendships ending is a sign of us (and other people) re-examining our priorities, values, and our alignments with our social circles. This has happened numerous times for me and you and other people. I have lost good friends over situations that are beyond our control, or over differences in opinions between us, and other things, and that is absolutely fine..

In our traditional teachings, we have an appreciation in our intellectual worldview that hearts that are meant to be together, will be.. The compatibility of people tend to be associated with forces/means beyond our control, and that separation that might happen allows us the peace to let people go.. As many of us, I have let go of friendships where I felt let down or completely at odds with over Palestine recently, and this is part of the alignment and realignment of ourselves with what is important to us, and that helps shape us, or reshape us to be more in-tune with who and what we are..

So, Free Palestine! 🇵🇸

This was inspired by a conversation I had with my wife after introducing her to a friend of mine and his wife where we hung out and had dinner with them in the park and came out of it refreshed and feeling light in our hearts. She said: “Talking to them felt light and easy.. Sometimes when we talk to people it feels like they’re probing, and you come out of it drained from your social energy, but not with them..” And I didn’t know this friend for a very long time, around 6 months or so..

But sometimes, our friendships don’t need a lot of work.. They just happen..

🎵: I’ve been listening to this album, it sounds like summer. It also sounds very, very good. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Haitian music before, but if it sounds like this, I’m all in.

🗞️ I came across two interesting articles recently.

1. “Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens and Berlin’s Olympiastadion: the complicated history of Euro 2024 final venue”. A fantastic read on how sport venues are perceived, and how sport is more than sport. South Africa’s apartheid fell because of sporting sanctions, among other reasons.

2. “The Francis Brothers: African Record Center” on how a record store in the 60s became an African institution in New York City, and the story of a famous Michael Jackson African sample.

Ok, now, time to start working.. Until next one.. Thank you for reading, and going through all the typos and the grammar mistakes, and the interrupted trains of thoughts..

1. Thank you chatGPT for the help with the translation, with a bit of proper ‘prompting’ from yours truly on how to translate. Apparently, there’s such a thing as ‘Prompt Engineer’. Here is a fascinating podcast episode that includes some minutes on on ‘how to speak to AI’..

2. I stopped before this paragraph to go pray at the mosque nearby, and when I finished, I said hi to the Bengali guy next to me, and the Egyptian who works at the co-op nearby, and was thinking of what that greeting strangers means.